Memory, Research and My Understanding of Roland Barthes
“Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of a myth…”
This quote by Roland Barthes (a French literary theorist) stems from the idea that history is written by the winners. It makes sense to me. It ties in with the theories of power and spectacle that I’ve discussed before. The control of the masses. Those currently in power will never hold themselves in a negative light and those that were reduced from their state of power are ‘evil’. This keeps the public feeling safe, protected and thinking that they are being led by people who fight for good.
Nothing is better to achieve this than to use the media. Documenting (or at least showing) what matters to the winners, not the losers. The focus is on what portrays those winners as just and good and hiding anything that may hold them in a negative light. It is scary to think that you can’t trust your government, so people don’t think like that and just trust and believe everything they see and are told. As is my understanding at least, based upon another quote by Barthes:
- It is the photograph, not the cinema, that put an end to resistance to believe in the past (Barthes, Camera Lucida, in McQuire 1998).
- Barthes argued that the fusion of reality with the past constituted the uniqueness of photography.
For Barthes, the relation of the camera to figuring a past, a history, a memory is an ontological relation. Also, to Barthes, the photography was not only never a memory “but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (McQuire 1998: 128).
Admittedly this is more relevant to the medium of portraying or capturing the past, but it’s point is relevant which is that any artifact that supposedly is “what was” or “what used to be” is manipulatable, manipulative, and potentially a farce.
I had a great deal of trouble being satisfied with any idea I came up with for a memory video. They all seemed to say the same irrelevant moot point. Eventually I decided that I wanted the film to feel very spacious and empty. I based it heavily on a deleted scene from ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ which could have existed as a short film itself.
Series One
The eventual problem was that is was close to 20 minutes long and so I’m unable to upload it to YouTube, so I’ll post another artifact that I’ll do of my own accord at a later date. For now though I’ll briefly describe what my film was about. Essentially it’s two guys sitting in a car attempting to remember what they were there to do. The dialogue and excuse for conversation is pushed along by a strange noise that the car is making and figuring out what it could be.
I wanted to play with the idea of what happens while you try to remember something and make interesting the activity of conversation which is actually just a stop-gap while the memory is recovered i.e. pure pointlessness.
Lapse Screenshot
I enjoy watching what we filmed. The dialogue and timing was very important in keeping it interesting. The film successfully felt very spacious and every word, no matter how pointless in content, always felt quite important and relevant to the film when spoken. This keeps the audience hooked. I called the film ‘Lapse’.
